Nvidia has acquired Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. Hugging Face is a platform where developers share AI models, datasets, and applications.
The acquisition was announced by Nvidia executive Jensen Huang in a blog post . According to Huang, the platform has more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators. Together, they share more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications. More than 200,000 companies use the platform to find, test, adapt and deploy AI.
Platform remains open
According to Huang, Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. Developers can continue to choose for themselves which models, frameworks, cloud and inference services, and computing platforms they want. NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face, says Huang.
In addition, the platform will continue to support open source and open weight models from across the ecosystem, from every model builder. It will continue to support multi-cloud and multi-accelerator development and deployment, so builders can use the hardware and infrastructure that best fit their work.
Role of Nvidia in open models
Huang points out that he recently co-authored an open letter on the importance of open weights for the AI economy, together with other sector leaders. In it, they stated that open weights broaden access to AI and distribute the leading role in AI across companies, institutions, and communities.
Nvidia says it has been involved in open models for years, demonstrated by multiyear investments and major contributions to open source platforms, including Hugging Face. The company reports being the largest provider of open models and data on Hugging Face, with more than 500 published models and over 250 open datasets.
NVIDIA has been committed to open weight models for years, demonstrated by multiyear investments and major contributions to open source platforms, including Hugging Face. NVIDIA has said that open models, data and tools broaden access to AI, and it has contributed hundreds of open models and datasets to Hugging Face as part of that effort.
Hugging Face continues to operate under its own name as part of Nvidia.
